“The bedroom’s eerie,” Cassie said, when we were out of the estate and negotiating the twisting little back roads. “Pajamas on the bed and an old paperback open on the floor. Nothing that gave me any ideas, though. Was that you, in the photo on the mantelpiece?”
“Presumably,” I said. I was still feeling like hell; the last thing I wanted to do was analyze Alicia Rowan’s decor.
“What she said about Jamie coming in upset one day. Do you remember what that was about?”
“Cassie,” I said, “we’ve been through this. Once more, with feeling: I remember sweet shining fuck-all. As far as I’m concerned, my life began when I was twelve and a half and on a ferry to England. OK?”
“Jesus, Ryan. I was just asking.”
“And now you know the answer,” I said, putting the car up a gear. Cassie threw up her hands, switched the radio on to something loud and left me to it.
A couple of miles later I took a hand off the wheel and rumpled Cassie’s hair.
“Fuck off, dickface,” she said, without rancor.
I grinned, relieved, and pulled one of her curls. She smacked my hand away. “Listen, Cass,” I said, “I need to ask you something.”
She gave me a suspicious look.
“Do you think the two cases are linked, or not? If you had to make a guess.”
Cassie thought about this for a long time, looking out the window at the hedges and the gray sky, clouds chasing fast. “I don’t know, Rob,” she said at last. “There are things that don’t match up. Katy was left where she’d be found right away, while…That’s a big difference, psychologically. But maybe the guy was haunted by the first time, figured he might feel less guilty if he made sure the family got the body back this time round. And Sam’s right: what are the odds of two different child-killers in the same place? If I had to put money on it…I honestly don’t know.”
I hit the brakes, hard. I think both Cassie and I yelled. Something had darted across the road in front of the car—something dark and low to the ground, with the sinuous gait of a weasel or a stoat, but much too big for either—and disappeared into the overgrown hedge on the other side.
We slammed forward in our seats—I had been going much too fast for a one-lane back road—but Cassie is fanatical about seat belts, which might have saved her parents’ lives, and we were both wearing ours. The car came to a stop skewed at a wild angle across the road, one wheel inches from a ditch. Cassie and I sat still, stunned. On the radio some girl band ululated with insane cheer, on and on.
“Rob?” Cassie said breathlessly, after a minute. “Are you OK?”
I couldn’t make my hands release their grip on the steering wheel. “What the hell was that?”
“What?” Her eyes were wide and frightened.
“The animal,” I said. “What was it?”
Cassie was looking at me with something new in her eyes, something that scared me almost as badly as the creature had. “I didn’t see an animal.”
“It went straight across the road. You must have missed it. You were looking out the side.”
“Yeah,” she said, after what felt like a very long time. “Yeah, I guess I was. A fox, maybe?”